Comment 3 for bug 615771

I've found a semi-feasible solution to this problem by trying an old hack that I used to use on Windows back in the days. You can speed up Adobe Reader by removing some of the plugins that ship with it. I've tried this with Acroread 8, the folder names may be different for other versions of Reader.

1. Run "gksu nautilus /opt/Adobe/Reader8/Reader/intellinux/plug_ins" in the terminal
2. Move the plugins to a subfolder "plugins_disabled"

Note that this will remove functionality from Adobe Reader. Depending on which plugins you disable, you will lose the capability to search through a document, for example. Most features though, like the capability to read out a document aloud, are used by very few people. So it doesn't make sense to load all features at startup. And you can always re-enable components by moving the plugin api-file back to the default folder.

This solved the problem of random freezes for me. This will also make Adobe Reader start up much faster :-)